They were Eurocopter EC-135s, a medium utility chopper with a ten-year history of some of the most rugged flying in the world. These were stripped-down troop transports with the doors modified so they could mount .30 caliber door guns. One of the choppers had a rear access panel open and the pilot half buried in the machine’s innards. Juan assumed he was working on the fault he had overheard Lieutenant Jimenez mention.
He pulled closer to the second chopper. The pilot of this bird, sporting a bandanna around his nose and mouth to filter out the worst of the smoke, was asleep in his seat. Cabrillo got an idea; better to use a well-trained enemy than an amateur ally. He sounded the truck’s horn, which turned out to be the only part of the old vehicle that still showed signs of life.
The man startled awake and lifted his sunglasses. His dark eyes widened when he saw the bloody apparitions stepping from the old pickup.
“We need an immediate evac,” Juan called to the pilot, pausing to help Mike Trono and his Quasimodo-like gait.
“Not without the Major’s permission,” the pilot replied.
“Radio him,” Juan said sharply. “He was the one who said to take off immediately. But fire the turbines first so we don’t waste any time.”
The pilot made no move to turn on the Eurocopter’s engines. Instead, he reached for his helmet, with its integrated communication’s system. Cabrillo glanced up the mountain. Through the smoke, it was difficult to make out details. It didn’t appear the lead vehicles of the rescue convoy had made it to the crash scene, but he decided they’d wasted enough time.
He moved quickly, drawing an automatic from his hip holster and rushing forward to place the muzzle against the pilot’s head before he could don the bulky helmet. The man froze.
“Start the engines now.” The cold timber in Juan’s voice was enough to command compliance.
“Take it easy, amigo. I’ll get you and your buddies out of here.” He carefully set the helmet back onto the copilot’s seat and set about preparing the chopper for flight.
Juan turned back to his men. “Miguel,” he said nodding to Mike Trono and then pointing to the cockpit. Trono knew immediately that the Chairman wanted him watching the pilot for any sign he was going to trick them. The pilot should be thinking that these were badly wounded and even more frightened comrades who needed medical care. It would come later that he’d realize he was being kidnapped.
The rest of the men climbed into the helo, strapping themselves into the web-canvas bench seats. Jerry carefully placed the power cell on the deck and found some bungee cords to secure it in place.
In the cockpit, the pilot hit the turbine starter. There was a loud pop followed immediately by the steadily increasing whine of the helo’s main engine. In seconds, the chorus was joined by the second motor. It would take more than a minute for them to reach the proper temperatures to engage the transmission and start the blades turning overhead.
Juan kept glancing upslope. The convoy must have reached the injured men by now. He wondered how long it would take the Major to understand what had happened. An hour would be nice, Cabrillo thought ruefully, but the truth was that the Argentine officer appeared more than capable. He would consider them lucky to get off the ground before coming under fire.
There came a clunk as the rotors started turning. Slowly at first, they quickly began whipping the smoke-gorged air. A tinny voice came over the helmet’s speakers. Even with the din filling the chopper, its strident tone was plain.
Time’s up, Juan thought.
The pilot motioned for Mike to hand him the helmet. Trono threw back a thousand-yard stare, the look of a man so deep into his own pain that nothing in the outside world mattered. The Argentine reached over to grab it, only to feel the cold steel of Juan’s pistol hard up against his neck.
“Leave it and just take off.”
“What’s going on?”
Mike suddenly shed his wounded persona and also had an automatic trained on the pilot.
“My friend here also knows how to fly this thing. Do what we say, and you’ll walk away alive. Screw with me, and some poor slob is going to be hosing your brains out of the cabin for a week. Comprende?”
“Who are you people? Americans?”
“Do I sound American to you?” Juan shot back. Like any of the world’s great languages, Spanish has diverse accents and dialects that are as regionally distinctive as fingerprints. Cabrillo also spoke Arabic, and no matter how he tried he couldn’t shake a Saudi accent. But in Spanish he was a perfect mimic. He could imitate royalty from Seville or a sot from a Mexico City slum.
What the pilot heard was the voice of a man from his own city of Buenos Aires. “I . . .”
“Don’t think,” Juan said. “Just fly. Take us south.”
He spent a microsecond considering his options. The hard eyes on him said there was only one. “Sí, sí. I’ll fly.”
His hands moved to the controls. Cabrillo looked up the hill once again. Trucks were racing down the log-hauling road, kicking up dust that mixed with the smoke already fouling the air. It wasn’t even going to be close. The chopper would be a mile away by the time the Ninth Brigade soldiers were in range.
Jerry Pulaski shouted Juan’s name.
And saved his life.
The pilot of the second chopper had to have heard Major Espinoza’s radio call. He stood just outside the Eurocopter with a raised pistol. He had seen the gun Juan had trained on the pilot and calculated that he was the greatest risk. When he heard Jerry yell, the Argentine shifted his aim and fired twice. From that instant, events happened in such rapid succession that it was impossible to know their order.
As a fine red mist enveloped the cargo area, Juan twisted and dropped the second pilot with a double tap to the chest that hit in such a tight group the penetrations overlapped. The man dropped where he stood, no dramatic flourish, no Hollywood contortions. One second he thought he was about to become a hero, and the next he was on the ground like discarded laundry.
Mike Trono fired across the cockpit when the pilot reached for his door, then took up the controls himself. He twisted the throttle, and the helo lifted from the ground. As it began to rotate around on its axes, he put in the opposite rudder, and the craft stabilized.
Juan turned, jamming his pistol against the pilot’s head hard enough to break skin. Blood ran from his ear. “Fly this chopper or when we hit a thousand feet you’ll fly out of it.”
Mike’s bullet had passed so close to the pilot’s eyes that they stung from the heat and GSR, but he blinked through the pain and started flying the Eurocopter. With Trono covering him again, Juan turned his attention to Jerry Pulaski and Mark Murphy on the rear bench seat. Mark was bent over Jerry, who was slouched back with an arm clamped across his belly. Making sure the pilot wouldn’t hear, Cabrillo asked, “How bad?”
The big man was going into shock. His face had lost all color, and he was shaking as though with fever.
“Gut-shot,” Mark replied. “Both rounds. At such close range, I expect damage beyond the intestines. Kidney. Liver maybe.”
Juan went numb. Such wounds were treatable at a level-one trauma center, but the nearest one of those was perhaps a thousand miles away. Out here, in the jungle, the chances of Pulaski surviving were zero. Cabrillo was looking at a dead man. And the pained eyes holding his knew it. “Stay with us, Ski,” Juan said, the words as empty as the hollow in his chest.
“I ain’t going anywhere,” Jerry replied, taking rapid sips of air between each syllable, lying.
DOWN ON THE GROUND, Major Espinoza realized his quarry was getting away in the helicopter he gave them permission to take. He ordered the logger who was driving their pickup to stop. Espinoza threw open his door and jumped to the ground. He only carried a pistol, an ivory-handled Colt .45, but he had it out and trained on the fleeing helicopter as soon as his boots hit the dirt. He had no hope of hitting the chopper, but he cycled through the pistol’s seven-round magazine as fast as he could pull the trig
ger, rage as much as gunpowder sending the bullets flying.
The men in the bed followed suit, filling the sky with autofire from their machine pistols. What they lacked in range they made up for in sheer weight of shot. In seconds, nearly two hundred bullets went chasing after the helicopter, and the men managed to reload and unleash another volley even as the first rounds began to swarm around the chopper like maddened wasps.
“INCOMING,”MIKE SHOUTED from the copilot’s seat as he saw the constellation of muzzle flashes through the drifting smoke.
The pilot instinctively juked the nimble chopper, but with so many bullets in the air, and so many of them spreading far from their intended target, it was impossible to evade them all. Nine-millimeters peppered the Eurocopter, tearing sizzling holes through its thin aluminum skin. Most passed harmlessly through, but there was the ominous clang of rounds striking the engine housings and doing who knows what to the delicate turbines. The chopper suddenly veered hard over. Juan lost his footing and, had he not grabbed for the door stanchion, would have fallen out of the aircraft.
Jerry lost his stoic battle with pain when the helo’s vibration shifted his center of gravity, doubling him over his bleeding belly and causing the bullet fragments to tear through yet more tissue. His scream lanced into Juan as if he’d been pierced by a dagger.
Cabrillo regained his footing, looking into the cockpit. Mike had firm control of the helicopter, his eyes scanning instruments and sky. The Argentine pilot was slumped in his seat. Juan swung around the back of the chair so he could better assess the man’s wounds. There was a fresh bullet hole in the Plexiglas side window close to the one Trono had fired a moment earlier, but this one had the elongated look of a round flying upward. It had hit the pilot in the side of his head at such an angle that while gouging through skin and perhaps cracking bone, it hadn’t penetrated the skull.
Like all head wounds, it bled copiously. Juan grabbed a balled-up rag from the floor between the seats, pressed it to the wound, and held it while his other hand reached back. Mark Murphy knew what the Chairman wanted and handed over a roll of surgical tape. Like wrapping a mummy, Juan wound four loops of tape around the pilot’s head to staunch the flow of crimson blood.
“Mike, you okay?” Juan asked in English. The need for subterfuge was over. The pilot would be unconscious for hours.
“Yeah, but we’ve got problems.”
Cabrillo glanced back to where Mark tended to Jerry Pulaski. “Don’t I know it.”
“We’re losing fuel, and either this model doesn’t have self-sealing tanks or they’ve failed. Add to that the rising engine temperature, and I think we might also have a broken oil line.”
Juan turned aft and leaned out the window, holding his body rigid against the tremendous wind pounding his head and upper body. The sound was a roar in his ears as if he were at the bottom of a waterfall. Trailing the copter, like proverbial bread crumbs, was a greasy feather of smoke. He could see it stretching back from the rear rotor boom to the point in the sky where a round had severed the oil line.
The Argentines would be coming hard, and the smoke would last for twenty or thirty minutes because there was so little wind and the air was already so heavily laden with ash and soot.
“Yeah, she’s smoking pretty badly,” he reported when he swung back toward the cockpit. After closing the door, they only had to shout to one another to be heard rather than screaming as they had been.
“How’s Jerry?” Mike asked. The two were not only combat partners but best friends.
Juan’s silence was Trono’s answer. Cabrillo finally asked, “Can we make Paraguay?”
“Not a chance. This bird had only half a tank when we started, and we’ve already lost nearly half that. If the engines hold together, the best we can hope for is maybe fifty miles. What do you want me to do?”
Thoughts poured like an avalanche through Juan’s mind. This is what he did best. He considered options, calculated odds, and made a decision all in the time it takes a normal person to digest the question. The factors hanging over his call weighed heavily. There was the success of the mission, his duty to Mike and Mark, the odds Jerry would be alive when they landed, and what they would do if he was. Ultimately, it came down to saving Jerry’s life.
“We go back. The Argies must have medical facilities at their base, and the other chopper will have the range to reach it.”
“Like hell,” Pulaski said, finding the strength in his anger to speak. “You’re not going down because I wasn’t fast enough on the draw, damn it.”
Juan gave Pulaski his full attention. “Jerr, it’s the only way.”
“Mike, get this tub to the RHIB,” Jerry shouted past Cabrillo. “Chairman, please. I know I’m dying. I can feel it getting closer and closer. Don’t throw your lives away on a dead man. I’m not asking, Juan. I’m begging. I don’t want to go knowing you guys went with me.”
Pulaski held out a hand, which Juan took. The congealed blood on his palm cemented their skin together. Jerry continued. “It ain’t noble, staying with me. It’s suicide. Argies are gonna shoot you for spies after torturing you.” He coughed wetly and spat a little blood onto the deck. “I got an ex who hates me and a kid who don’t know me. You’re my family. I don’t want you to die for me. I want you to live for me instead. You understand?”
“I understand you copied that sentiment from Braveheart,” Juan said. His lips smiled. His eyes couldn’t.
“I’m serious, Juan.”
For Cabrillo, time stopped for a few moments. The steady beat of the rotor and the whine of the turbine faded to silence. He’d known death and loss. His wife had been killed by a drunk driver—herself. He’d lost agents and contacts during his time at the CIA, and the Corporation had been visited by the Grim Reaper as well, but he’d never asked another man to die so that he could live.
He reached into his pack and handed the portable GPS to Mike. “The RHIB’s at waypoint Delta.”
“There’s no place to land,” Mike said. “You remember how thick that jungle was. And there’s no way I can ditch this thing in the river without killing us all.”
“Don’t worry about an LZ,” Mark Murphy shouted forward. “I got that covered.”
Cabrillo knew to trust the eccentric Mr. Murphy.
“Swing us around and punch in waypoint Delta.”
“Not Delta,” Murph said. “Echo.”
“Echo?” Juan questioned.
“Trust me.”
The Eurocopter’s navigational computer was self-explanatory, so Mike punched in the coordinates from the handheld GPS, then swung the chopper around to a southeasterly bearing. So far, his flying had been smooth and controlled, just as he’d been taught. Gomez Adams would be proud.
“Looks like we have enough fuel. Barely,” he said.
“Chairman,” Mark shouted. “Starboard side. Maybe three klicks back.”
“What?”
“I saw the flash of sun off the other chopper’s windshield.”
Juan looked out the side window. He didn’t see anything but he didn’t doubt Mark’s eyesight. The Argentines were coming a lot faster than he’d thought. Then he should have realized it. With their helo burning oil, they didn’t have the speed to match the other bird. And the Argentine Major would tear the guts out of his aircraft in order to get his prey.
“Mike,” he shouted. “Give us everything she’s got. Company’s coming.”
The turbines kicked up a notch but didn’t sound healthy. Metal was grinding someplace in the engine compartment, and it was only a matter of time before they shut down.
Juan looked around the cabin for additional weapons. The door-mounted .30 caliber was a better option than their H&K machine pistols, but only if the other helo came up on the port side where the gun was mounted. He found a medical kit under the bench seat and a red plastic box containing a large-bore flare pistol and four stubby projectiles. Juan knew the script for this mission didn’t include a billion-to-one shot with a
flare, so he left it on the bench.
“Mark, jury-rig a harness for me,” he ordered as he set to work unbolting the old Browning machine gun from its webbing gimbal.
The gun was a thirty-pound, four-foot-long antique with a single pistol grip at the end of its boxy receiver. A belt of fifty brass cartridges dangled from the breach and made an almost musical chime when they clinked together. He was familiar enough with the weapon and knew it had a reputation for reliability as well as a recoil that could shatter teeth.
Juan stripped off his shirt. He wrapped the garment around the Browning’s twenty-four-inch barrel and tied it off with the rest of the surgical tape.
Murph, meanwhile, shucked out of his combat harness and reconfigured the nylon webbing into a long loop that he clipped to a D ring just forward of the starboard door. He clipped the other end to the back of Cabrillo’s combat harness. He used the strap of his backpack to make a second loop that would go around the Chairman’s ankles. He would hold the other end to prevent Juan from falling into the Eurocopter’s slipstream.
“I see them in my mirror,” Mike announced from the cockpit. “If you’re going to do something, do it quick.”
“How much farther?” Juan asked.
“Eight miles to Echo. And just so you know, I don’t see anything below us but jungle.”
“I said, trust me,” Mark fired back hotly.
Juan looked at Pulaski. Had he not been shot, he knew his men would be bantering, not sniping at one another. Jerry’s head lolled and, had Mark not strapped him in, he would have tumbled to the floor.
“They’re opening their side door,” Trono said. “Okay, I see a guy. He’s got a Browning like ours. He’s fired! He’s fired!”
Accustomed to strafing unarmed civilians fleeing from their villages, the gunner had fired far too soon. Three numbers then came into play. Mike saw the muzzle flashes reaching him at the speed of light, about three hundred million meters per second. The stream of bullets was approaching from a kilometer away at eight hundred and fifty meters per second. The nerve impulse, from brain to wrist, traveled at only a hundred meters per second. But it only had a meter to go. One-hundredth of a second after the first round was fired, Trono cut the power to dump altitude. Gravity had more than a second to pull the helicopter earthward. The string of white phosphorus tracers arrowed well over the spinning disk of the chopper’s main rotor.